cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Ortolan

I have read about the experience of eating ortolan. Never actually eaten it, but I am familiar with the concept. If you are not familiar with this dish, google it. The ortolan is a tiny songbird which the French capture, keep in a small room and force feed for a few weeks before literally drowning it in cognac, cook it for a few minutes and finally eat the entire thing. One is supposed to hide under a cloth while eating it, both out of guilt and to concentrate the aromas.

The act of eating this bird is supposed to be a phenomenal experience. One bite of the bird's abdomen is supposed to be very bitter and unpleasant. You are to take that bite anyway, since it is part of the overall experience and considered absolutely necessary.

Last Friday after noon, within about 5 minutes of having missed what should have been a very simple shot at the best buck I have ever seen in the flesh, I thought about the ritual of eating the ortolan.

Always I have considered myself a meat hunter. I prefer to shoot does and in fact have refused shots at bucks these past 3 years because too many people shoot them exclusively and the population seemed out of balance. I am not a hunter of trophies. And yet my heart raced when I realized what I was looking at on Friday. An enormous buck at only about 100 yards distance. I have never felt this before. This tremendous excitement, racing pulse and breathless sensation. I steadied my rifle, pulling the sling taut with my elbow and began to carefully control my breath. The antlers were almost square in their form. Very wide. The body large and fat. The buck was facing away from me and I waited for a better shot that would ruin as little meat as possible.

The buck finally gave me a picture perfect broadside shot. I aligned the crosshairs straight for it's heart and squeezed the trigger. The buck instantly bolted with no sign whatsoever of having been hit. And it fact it turned out that I had missed him clean.

I have never felt like that before. To have missed such an easy shot on a deer like that. My God. Such failure. Such monumental failure. I ached. I felt a profound sense of loss.

It was tempting to go back to the house and call it a day. But I thought that the right thing to do was to get back into position behind the tall grass and see if anything else showed up.

As I sat there behind the grass, I thought about what had happened. I decided that this was the abdomen of the ortolan. The moment that is probably inevitable for any hunter. One day you will be confronted with the beast of your dreams and you will fail in your shot. Yes. This is part of hunting. It is better to feel this profound sense of failure and loss than to not have felt it. It was worth leaving the office early and coming out here into the woods and fields just to see that such a deer exists and to experience this wild emotion as a result of missing it.

After about 30 minutes of sitting there in silence, waiting, I was rewarded with the sight of 2 equally impressive bucks walking slowly across the meadow together about 350 yards away. Much too far to even consider shooting at (especially after having flubbed a 100 yard shot and now being unsure of my scope's zero). But it was worth having stayed out there just to see that those deer existed.

On Sunday I decided to check most of our scoped rifles for correct zero and re-zero those that were off. I set up a target frame at 50 yards with a large sheet of paper. Sure enough, my 30-06 was printing groups about 5 inches to the left of my point of aim. At the 100 yard distance the buck had been at, that would translate to a 10 inch discrepancy. Huge. No wonder I'd missed - the bullet must have zipped harmlessly right in front of the deer. I made some adjustments to the scope and quickly had the rifle nailing bullseyes every time.

Then I set up Trish's deer rifle, which is a 7mm-08. Wow. Something about that rifle, base and scope combination just works. Before I'd made a single adjustment, my very first shot was only 3 inches off of center. I quickly had that rifle printing bullseyes with 1 inch groups. The thing shoots like a laser beam. I love it.

So the problem is fixed now and my next shot at a deer will be successful.

Last night while I lay in bed before sleep I realized that I had been missing something else before shooting at that buck. Magic. I did nothing special before begining the hunt this season. Didn't ask for anything, didn't appeal to the deer, didn't give thanks for last year's harvest. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You don't just sashay off into the woods and expect a titan of the wild to fall to your shot just because you want it to. Oh no. You've got to have some superstition or some magic or religion or something.

I'll do something after work today. I haven't decided what exactly. I need a ritual.

11:48 a.m. - 2008-10-06

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